logophobia

Max Blagg

Three Walks in New York City

Starting from Center Place at Grand Street
The gun sign Weegee photographed is long gone
along with the firearms dealers it once announced.
On this side street of Manhattan a man
landed on the spikes of the railings
around Police Headquarters,
tossed out a high window by drunken cops.
It didn’t even make the front page.
Back then they could hose you down with impunity.
Now at least we get some of it on film
Those cops are gone to cemeteries in Queens,
the railings melted down for artillery shells,
supermodels live there now,
and across the street looking North,
400 Broome is a college dorm.
In a previous life the building was an evidence locker,
cluttered with drugs and weapons,
the tag on a bloodstained hammer describing
in clinical detail the end of a life.
Massive quantities of confiscated dope from the French Connection case
were replaced with sugar and cornstarch.
The theft was only discovered because insects
were forming long lines to feed on the switched bait,
by which time half the city was on the nod.

Who lives here now?

Purple Haze Jezebel luigi Extreme pubic
templefong 2 Guys and a Switchblade
… kikiofbroomestreet mangomama Mandalay haikustew
anothergreenworld freefish mrsmoustache
star80 El_Bordello brasseye jackieho

Each intersection a gathering point for memory.
Criminals were hanged and buried at crossroads
so their bodiless souls would not know which road to take.
Lives in cities are lost in so many ways;
slapped down by buses and cabs,
stabbed by dagger, erased with shotgun,
sliced by knife and sword,
split by axes, crushed by elevators,
jabbed with ice-pick and contaminated needle;
even lightning bears down;
that boy on a Soho rooftop
cavorting in a summer storm
unwittingly invoked the
lord of thunder and electric light
concealed in a passing cloud.
Thor iced him in mid step
with a single bolt to the head.
Men struck by lightning
out number women by seventy per cent
it’s the iron in their blood
testosterone calling down ionic surge
of heat and light a terrible bang
and your shoes explode
as the lightning emerges
from your tailpipe
having fried your insides
on its furious passage
through your mortal frame,
your final sip of tequila still buzzing
in the thorax and gone again
back to matter, or no matter
drawn up to heaven
on a bolt of light,
an electric hook.

Walk on, walk on, past Spring where I first landed
in this mad metropolis and yelled up
at the window of number 118,
(there being no doorbell)
thank you Caroline thank you Iggy,
who hardly knew me,
for taking me in and feeding me
and Saint Jerry at the St Adrian Company Bar & Grill
who hired me to wash dishes
promoted me to busboy after I helped out in a fistfight.
I finally made it to waiter and spent much of my time
running down Broadway after people who’d walked out on their checks
the place finally closed down after too many indoor rainstorms
and the building shortly after tumbled into the street
felled by the weight of its own karma…

Who lives here now?

Tarantella marcello peckerheater wifebeater
liontooth midwife sightseer grenadier
billy joe rambo barfly easyfeeder
monthlybleeder
paycheck and coatcheck and joystick

June 3rd 1968. Guns and gunshots in Union Square.
Valerie Solanas crossed the park in that dumb newsboy hat,
sat on a bench and re-read her manifesto for cutting up men,
then went up to the sixth floor of 33 Union Square West
with the .22 in a brown paper bag.
She put two into Andy Warhol’s torso.
A visiting art critic (Mario Amaya if you must know)
got shot in the butt as he fled
this performance piece and
did Fred Hughes mess his custom tailored pants
when Valerie held the gun to his head? Wouldn’t you?
I peed my pants when chased by skinheads in London once,
took me years to admit that, terrified, I bolted like a rabbit.
They didn’t catch me and Fred was spared
when Valerie’s pistol jammed.
Andy survived, maimed for life.
Later Larry Rivers filmed the scars for his movie Tits
a seedy exploitation of the breast
that played for months at the Bleecker Street cinema
and Avedon photographed Andy’s chest
looking like the surface of the moon
Lou Reed wrote a poem about it
that was published in the Paris Review

Valerie went to jail and never got back the play
that made her guncrazy in the first place.
( Its inviting title was Up Your Ass.
Andy had promised to make it into a film.

Who lives here now?

Gunshy jippyjappy french letter diga may
tarantula eyewash slapacracker bungsniff
pecksniff jarndyce & jarndyce

Light floods over the low buildings of the square from all directions,
illuminating the sanitized park where Old Methadonians
used to gather on damaged benches,
methadone crawling through their blood like snakes.
Skateboarders hit it now,
the crack of custom boards
giving innocent citizens whiplash.
At 17th street, four cop cars equals one hundred well dunked donuts.
In the greenmarket the dirt on the rutabagas and the celeriac was a murky black,
as if they had been cultivated in industrial waste.
Ruddy cheeked farmers must be summoned from their upstate estates
to explain why their spuds cost two dollars a pound,
market prices adjusted to snare the yupsters
sweeping through Whole Foods,
waving credit cards sharp as knives.
“It’s our New York now, abuelo,” they snarl
when some grizzled hipster starts to talk about the old days….
(well alright then…)
The light is sharp as a butcher’s blade in Union Square today,
Prussian blue like an Austrian’s eyes or an Yves Klein no relation to
Klein’s on the square where Ted Berrigan and Joe Brainard
fondle[d] soft sweaters and plump rumpled skirts
on their way to poetry…
Both those poets gone too fast,
one by narcotic tribulations and the other by the plague
that swept through our beautiful youth through the ’80s and beyond –
a wound that does not close…
Klein’s is long gone but Filene’s has moved up from the basement.
At the foot of Park Avenue, cabs unload undernourished models
outside the new hotel, a step away from
where Max’s Kansas City once
punched holes in the night,
the serious artists in drunken intellectual clumps up front
Jackie Curtis and Rene Ricard shrieking in the back room,
dispensing pass and fail cards to the hip and the lame.
and Candy says, I’ve come to hate my body/and all that it requires…”

Who lives here now?

kafkat slimjim ally yoola brimstone fakemoney jockstrip
infuze deepfreeze fireball weaknee

2nd walk, from St marks & Third to 291 Fifth Avenue

Saint Marks Place and Third Avenue, clerking at the bookshop,
thinking about the Five Spot, a jazz club gone before I arrived here
with nothing but Lunch Poems in my pocket.
They explained everything about New York, then and now.
Westward across 8th street toward Broadway,
Grace Church silvered by winter sunlight,
buildings full of academics living large,
vast apartments and tenure and regular publication of books
that go directly onto the university syllabus.
My green eyes scan the brutalist high rise at Mercer Street.
Ana Mendieta tried to fly here, Ana couldn’t fly, Ana died.
The leylines of this village glitter like rivers seen from a plane.
One block south Mickey Ruskin made his last stand at Chinese Chance,
it should have been called Chinese Rocks, but we knew it as One U,
now a deli serving innocent apprentices,
Mickey wouldn’t give me the night shift, where the money was,
where Schnabel and Yablonsky
were flipping burgers and smashing crockery,
and somebody was shooting up
in the bathroom while some other luckier fucker
got a humjob in the next stall
and each night unspooled like a silken tourniquet…
instead I had to deal with the daytime,
furious merchants waving unpaid bills,
and in the late afternoon my barcrowd,
a small constellation of hunger artists,
fried by another day of trying to top Pollock,
secure in the bitter knowledge that it simply can’t be done.
The joint was smoked out by heroin, eventually.
A fire of unknown origin. The line cook died trying
to retrieve his new shoes….
Ghost traces of elegant and shabby saloons and salons,
Norman Fisher’s penthouse on West 11th,
lines of blow on every flat surface,
sickly glamour of the early 80s
wafting in like rotten flowers.

Who lives here now?

Killyourmother sugarbush labranchina fatbooty
dipstick aneurhythm WeHaveMice Thoughtpolice
chow downer Auntie Christ Fallopian Tubesteak
Jackalsass Deadbeat Malegaze BetelJeuese

On University Place the cobbler, an endangered species,
bends to his lathe,
but even he has diversified in this labelous age;
a sideline in slightly used Chanel bags and Prada shoes.
A Dawn Powell lookalike turns the corner of 11th Street,
gray haired lady going to hock her husband’s vintage Rolex
at Ilana Fine Jewelry, established 1942.
The Cedar Tavern where the big guys in overalls
drank and fought and tore the toilet doors off their hinges,
no longer exists.
They sneered at dapper Alex Katz insisting on the figurative,
chatting with Frank and Joe,
while hungry women waited in line to undress for genius,
to be poleaxed by an Abex, horned by an ibex
reeking of turpentine.
Many died too soon of hard drink and heart attacks,
left shards of glory on the walls of the wealthy.
Franz Kline, dead at 52,
brush loaded, heart exploded…
The real Dawn Powell was a friend of Kline,
and at his funeral she watched
as the hungry women
compared the size of their canvases
as they jockeyed for pole position in the front pew
of the fancy uptown Church
from which the corpse was then dispatched,
pursued by a cortege of wannabee widows,
while strong men wept in the streets
“important in their grief”.as Powell phrased it.
Her description of Kline;
” Successful too late to give a damn about it, or to change his hearty tastes. Loved more than Pollock, more than any artist I can remember, partly because he didn’t have a working wife to insult people for him, or fend off the duds, or watch his purse, so he could pay somebody’s studio rent or baby bill or buy the bar drinks all night without fear.”
(my kind of guy..)
Up Broadway now to where
the Flatiron glides north, terracotta sails
undulating in the wind
as it drags Fifth and Broadway in its wake.
23rd is a crosstown double wide running out to Western skies,
Kenneth Patchen said, “23rd Street runs into heaven”
Further west the Chelsea’s redbrick walls
wrapped by black lace balconies
recall a thousand parties
The sound of laughter and breaking glasses
still rocking the broad staircase
that runs all the way to the starlit roof
where supple dancers
once gathered in attack formation
to laminate the dawn.
Clouds of intoxicating smoke
perfumed the hallways
and the French girls
waiting patiently for Johnny in Room 909
Babette, Chouette, Katrina Abbysinya
they are just about fine,
pale junky arms raised up at twilight
invoking the ‘ghosts of electricity’
still surging through the building.
Eager developers come and go
cursed and dismissed by saints and witches…
they will have to tear the place down
to the bone to flush those gaudy spirits
embedded in the woodwork and the stone.

At 26th and Fifth in 1989
at a nightclub called MK,
another manic Goode & Becker funhouse
we held a Viking burial for Cookie M.,
undone at forty like so many of our crew.
Saluted her with noise and tears and roses,
launched the funeral boat and refilled our powdered noses.
Twenty six years now in the country of the dead.
In Madison Square Park, a lowslung sun
strikes the golden tower
of the National Insurance building.
their motto : “The light that never fails”.
Delicate skeletons of wintry trees remain in shadow.
February, distant promise of Spring,
each day reaching twilight in midafternoon….
At the little church around the corner,
someone is praying for someone to be healed.
A few steps on where the number 291 should gleam in polished brass,
Stieglitz’s gallery disappeared, the building gone,
erased and raised again in glass by architects with degrees in grandiosity

Who lives here now?

Tumbril Doublehump Rumplestilts welbuilt
halfalive flattop elderburied flattop ginsling quisling Walter’s Mittens

Third walk: from Rector Street to Christopher and Hudson

At Number Two Rector Street, an office cleaner murdered here a month ago,
stalked and killed by a maniac, has laid her shadow on the building.
Across Trinity Place the church, surrounded by temples of commerce, can’t save me.
By the WTC, carrion eaters earn a living from the dead
by hawking pictures of 9/11, nine years on.
Seven cranes are working in this massive pit,
money pouring into the ground, and hovering in the air, unresolved,
three thousand souls still not properly dispersed to their own Valhallas.
I was walking my daughter to school that morning,
PS 234,
500 yards North of where the first plane went in.
It still enrages me, that they were so close to us, to her.
I’d block their path to paradise if I could.
Flight 11 from Boston flew over my head
so low I could see the markings on the underside
and it just kept on going, too low oh God too low
and entered the North Tower and disappeared in smoke and flame.
The entire side of the building rippled like a pond struck by a stone…
it was true to say I could not believe my eyes.
A jetliner piercing a skyscraper like a javelin.

We are supposed to look back at the past without regret,
but who can dismiss the grief that morning brought?
And the years since, Halliburton, Cheney
the persecution and destruction of Iraq,
the unnumbered dead who won’t see this blue sky today
or feel the rain tomorrow.
“The past? Buckminster Fuller said, “keep it, ..cover it with a dome..”
Can the Manzoni and move on.
Independence Plaza at Harrison,
a bowling ball of opium on the coffee table,
Jimmy hands me the Buck knife and says
“Here, take a chunk, make some money..”
and so I carved a modest lump,
but the profits went up in smoke,
no Xanadu for me, no caves of ice
just minor visions and massive constipation.
the neighborhood empty as a Ballard story when we moved in,
a deserted motorway to ride bikes on, art on the beach.
40 North Moore, a quiet blue collar highrise,
distinguished only by a poodle plummeting from the 30th floor,
flung by a raging boyfriend,
and duly added to our compendium of defenestration.
This garage on Greenwich used to belong to the FBI,
always filled with fake cabs, ambulances,
bread trucks stuffed with recording devices to document
an endless stream of witless gangsters
mumbling about macaroni and cannoli.
Take the cannoli. Who said that? Not Tony Soprano,
but he lived across the way, art imitating life,
which keeps showing up. Here for instance,
posed like a Helen Levitt portrait,
three girls playing hooky, smoking cigarettes in the freezing street.
One of them the daughter of an old friend.
Last time I looked she was a tiny seal shimmering in a summer pool.

Crossing Debrosses Street, Jungle Red, a salon for the ages.
Red gave great haircuts, and saved small plastic packages of cut hair,
like the bags strung around somebody’s tomato patch
in the country to keep away the deer.
Around the corner on Canal,
a small agile beauty named Marcia,
a tiny volcano powered by hand,
documented the Mudd-bound mob in her night studio.
All the lost boys paused in their cavorting
and lined up for her lens.
Madness enough for everyone.

Who lives here now?

Wishbone Shoofly Vietcong Kingcreep
French kiss bitchslap Lupus rex curmudgeon
femstem gusgrissom shadrach meatshack mortimersnerd

Across Canal the remnants of a row of tiny houses;
Geoff Hendricks’ home a museum of Fluxus beauty,
Lawrence Wiener’s words inscribed across the lintel.
“Water spilled from source to use”.
Next door a store dedicated to cookbooks,
some written certainly by Elizabeth David,
who probably ate mushrooms with John Cage, or should have.
Her cooking instructions are random and casual;
‘Take a handful of butter’…
‘grind up a dozen hermit crabs..”
She pokes fun at Marinetti’s critique of pure pasta,
which makes me hungry,
but this long stretch of Greenwich has nothing but the UPS building,
flat and low, moving goods and packages day and night.
I walked the saluki here in another life.
We had two floors in a brownstone on Vandam
always filled with passing travelers,
like Ohne Zee, back from Nepal
with stunning photos of Tibetan burial rituals
corpses carried in procession
high up the mountains
and expertly dismembered
flesh and soul fragments dispersed among the birds of the air.
Ohne smoked a great deal of angel dust
which frequently affected her judgement.
I hope she’s still alive and dustfree today.
Down Varick from Vandam
the hound dragged me behind
dreaming of deserts filled with gazelles
he would take down in his long jaws.
He ran after cars and one finally caught him.
At Morton Street acres of new glass rise above the waterfront
where lines of empty trucks once parked,
animated at night by dozens of copulating bodies….
Peter Hujar caught the cool menace of the lower West Side
in the seedy sexed up Seventies,
furtive men moving in shadows, looking for more than a kiss
as a fatal virus leapt from one to the next.
On the corner of Leroy, clever English lads
working the art business. Smells like fresh baked money.
I warm my hands on an Alex Katz and leave.
The industrious gallerists never look up from their laptops.
Last block to Christopher is solid granite and brick,
church and school and the old Post Office with its curving corners,
red as a Hopper painting, mortar cured with the mason’s pee.
The posties long gone on their appointed rounds,
now the young and the restless pace its tasteful interiors,
filled to the brim with Adderall,
mid century furniture, blameless art.
At 11th and Hudson Dylan Thomas
staggered from the White Horse Tavern
and tumbled senseless in the street
after eighteen shots of rye.
Someone helped him to Saint Vincent’s,
but he sank and drowned in the whiskey river,
his last words, “It’s not my round!”
They’re tearing down that hospital too.
replacing it with five million dollar townhouses
for offshore investors…..
Let the old bohemians expire in their walkups.
Nothing sacred, everything remembered.

1. 8th Avenue Rainstorm, 1974, Max Blagg [↩]
2. Max Blagg at Sparkle Street Social and Athletic Club, Howl Arts, May 2016 [↩]